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This is a programmatic piece about what I consider art and its purposes, what I do and what I do not want to see. It may be a rant due to my recent experience on a new artistic platform but, hey, I’m a human being and what is enough is enough.

This is a programmatic piece about what I consider art and its purposes, what I do and what I do not want to see. It may be a rant due to my recent experience on a new artistic platform but, hey, I’m a human being and what is enough is enough. I expressed my thoughts various times in books and blog posts, so I am not new to this kind of thought. Of course, this is entirely personal and it is true for me – everyone is totally free to indulge in whatever they like best, provided they do non interact with me in any way. But they do, as what I find offensive is everywhere and cannot be avoided by an algorithm. What is art today? It is the perfect depiction of what society is: a cruel assembly of neurotic, perverted, self-centred outbursts of hate, inner malaise and lack of morality. There is no more attention to elegance, fluidity, balance, good taste and colour choice. Everyone can do art and if they cannot, there is AI to make things on their behalf. This is absurd. It is obvious that all that derives from an attempt to get free from traditional strict standards in morals, which were (and still are) decided upon by churches of every kind. It is no mystery that the Church was and still is obsessed with sexuality and that it took very great care to suppress it in every possible way, imposing a rigid morality and condemning anything related to pleasure – any kind of pleasure – in the name of a supposed recipe to get future gratification in the afterlife. This is absurd as well. There are more negative aspects affecting people’s lives than sex, which is natural, private and of no one’s concern, but it is obvious that condemning greed, violence and power was not among the Church's intents for self-explanatory reasons.

In any case, the revolt against the suffocating respectability and academicism imposed upon the artists ended in a general subversion of every standard, or, better, the effacement of every standard in any field of art, from technical knowledge to slavish reiteration of established models, to give free rein to experimentation and personal whims. Political and economic potentates favoured that stance against tradition when they found it was necessary for the Western lifestyle to survive to find an alternative to Soviet communism which wanted realism as its standard in art to glorify its achievements. They found that alternative in whatever was anti-realistic. Rich and powerful art collectors started to buy informal extravaganzas, less famous collectors did not want to be outdone and critics followed and in less than half a century what was revered and admired in the past was a sign of being a dangerously left-footed mossback in a world full of young revolutionists. That happened everywhere: music, visual arts, fashion, lifestyle… Then came the ‘68, then came the well-arranged invasion of drugs to lead astray dissidents before they could completely subvert the consumer society and then the dissolution of what was considered the norm is now completed.

Nowadays anything goes. Being wild, uneducated, skill-free, culture-free, inhibition-free and proud to be so is the new norm – because, let us face it, our society seems unable to live without a norm. The more one can offend and shock others with images and words dealing with sex and death, the better it is. Horror and perversion is the norm. Dissonance is the norm. Banality is the norm. Breaking the rules is the new rule. This is absurd. The truth is all these so-called artists are so engulfed in prejudices and old moral standards they cannot see them. While protesting they are free, they continue to stress upon the trite subject of sex. Were they really free, they would not feel the need to say it boldly and loudly. One does not harp around a problem one has totally solved within themselves. Repressed and unresolved, they repropose their obsessions to find a way to dash them – and they amplify them...

What is art? It is not:

• a therapy – there are doctors and therapists of every methodological orientation to help those who need to be helped

• an outlet of emotional imbalance – there is a whole array of psychological strategies to choose from

• a substitute for real intercourses – there are other ways to consume one’s sexual energies

• a way to exorcize death – death is inevitable, unavoidable and the sooner one comes to terms with that, the better it is

• a way to fight against prejudices – becoming a political activist is a more effective alternative.

More than anything else, art is NOT a way to soothe, disperse, or cancel one’s problems with life. Nobody has the right to pollute the world with their garbage, whether it is physical, emotional or intellectual and in a society that proclaims respect for the environment as its main concern, the modern admiration for the artists’ aggressiveness is absurd – shall I stress one more time that the more one talk about something, the less that something is real? Shall I stress that women artists do not see the bad service they are doing to other women when they depict them according to the new agreed-upon canons – the sexier, the better? Shall I stress that there ARE canons in modern society one cannot but obey?

What are the new canons? Images and language must be violent, shocking, lusty to the point of being perverted, preferably cartoon-like or, on the contrary, cheesy and harmless and, again, cartoon-like: cute, they call that. I call that banal. No other choice. Poor young artists, it is not entirely their fault. Nobody taught them better. Nobody warned them. Nobody cared for them. They are raised to be complying buyers and workers in the present society based on massification, ignorance and lack of conscience. But they fiercely defend their right to do what they please. Of course, what they like is what they were taught to like by their parents, who left them with their mobiles since they were born, their teachers, who did their best not to break the rules they have to obey to get paid, the entertainment industry, which is built by the same people who produce the goods they sold as formidable. No inner education. No moral outside the usual standards. No sense of respect for oneself and then for others. Ignorance is knowledge, truth is a lie and beauty is a casket of make-up products. And this is it. At least for what it is nowadays.

And this is it. What is art for me? Art is an open door to mystery, a comfort in hard times and a way to show the magnificence of nature. To those inclined not to misunderstand me, I would say it is a religious experience, meaning with that term something totally a-confessional, a-clerical and a-historically established. I am no conventional believer and I give no credit to any known practice, “sacred” texts and morals. What I believe comes from within and it is firmly rooted in the Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Despite my health problems, I consider myself a healthy person with no emotional and intellectual perversions and what comes from my within is not polluted by personal whims and imbalance. I have the audacity to say that it is transpersonal. Maybe THAT is offensive to someone but I cannot please anyone. On the contrary, I do not want to please. I just want to be free the way the others are.

That said, Do I make art? No, I don’t do art any more. I cannot afford artmaking since I started having problems with my wrist. What I do now is surface pattern design: a handmade branch of the so-called “minor arts”. I have no problem with that definition. I work in a minor key – those who are musically aware know that the minor keys are not inferior to the major keys. I work on a minor scale. I try to do my share of pleasant things to be worn with lightness and style according to what style and lightness is for me. If I can find clients, it is all very well, if not, it is all very well the same, I cannot be different from myself. I can learn new styles, I can adopt different palettes, can come up with something more similar to something I would never wear myself but cannot be untrue to me. It took too much to become the real me not to be true to it.

I promise I will not repeat myself. The present piece took some time from my life which I could have used in a different way but I felt writing was a moral obligation for me. No more of that, goodbye.